Thus spake the Master Programmer: "When you have seen a TMZ story on the front page, it will be time for you to leave."

... and thanks for all the fish.

The micro-usb port stopped working on my Nexus 7 (2013). The battery was already completely drained, of course, and it seemed like the tablet and all the files that were on it were lost. Then I found out it supports wireless charging, spent $10 on a pod and the tablet is still going to this day.

Sure, it's slow and inefficient and you have to place the tablet just right (configured it to go 'ding' when it starts charging, that helps). I wouldn't pick it as the primary means of charging a new device, but I certainly got my money's worth out of that $10 pod.

Saving lives, actually. https://deepmind.com/applied/

Corporations break the law all the time. Smuggle diamonds out of Africa. Smuggle weapons into war zones. Bribe officials everywhere. Handle moneys that come from trafficking drugs and people. The list goes on and on. If you put it on the balance you'd find that corporations breaking laws for "the greater good" is a PR drop in the ocean compared to corporations breaking laws for the greater bottom line.

In many games and sports the final score can be misleading. If you want to know how close it was you have to watch (and understand) the match.

In match 1 AlphaGo won by half a point, the smallest margin of victory possible, but it was not a close game. AlphaGo was leading since relatively early. It's AlphaGo style to "bleed" points away when its leading to make the game simpler, safer, and ultimately still win. AlphaGo is very good at calculating the would-be final score.

In match 2 well into the mid-game it was still dead even. Both players kept raising the stakes again and again, so when the bottom finally came off the difference in points was huge. Yet it was a very close match and a superb performance by Ke Jie.

It's not about the man-vs-machine showdown that the media sells. Go is about our quest to understand the game, individually and collectively.

AlphaGo is exciting because it is a breakthrough in our understanding of the game. Playing against a stronger opponent has always been a great method to improve your own game. You lose, you study your loss, you repeat. That's something every go player appreciates, but top professionals can't do that. They are the strongest so they have trouble finding stronger opponents... until now. In about 70 public games played AlphaGo has already made an impact on top level play and on our collective understanding of the game. What's to come is even more exciting.

I think I speak for every go player when I say we'd love to get beat by AlphaGo every single day.

For those of us watching from the sidelines, it was a fantastic match, an outstanding performance by Ke Jie (the human). Up to a certain point in the middle-game he played perfectly by AlphaGo's own evaluation. See here https://twitter.com/demishassa...

Spot on. Exciting new system boosts game sales for the early titles. In Nintendo's case it's very common for those early titles to be Nintendo titles. My guess is the motivation for getting Zelda is I-need-something-to-play, and the motivation for getting Mario Kart is I-need-something-to-show-my-friends.

If you can't think of anything else that's fun to do in Hawaii at night, then yes, stay home and play video games.

They go into politics.

Same here

The users are getting a correct result. Good.
The developers moved on to something else that's also important. Good.
The machine is doing 15% more work than strictly necessary... Is it slowing down the users? No. Are we getting hammered by the electricity bill? No. Is the machine getting tired? No. So what exactly is the problem?

Like the real Donald (Knuth) said: "premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming".

I don't remember the exact case, but this point has already been addressed by a court. The ruling was a suspect CAN NOT be held under "tell us your password so we can inspect your data", but CAN be held under "unlock your phone/drives/whatever yourself so we can inspect your data". A technicality.

We wrote "XOR AX, AX" instead of "MOV AX, 0" because it was maybe 1 CPU cycle faster. Just about everything we did back then fell under the proverbial premature optimization, and we liked it!

But you don't have any 4th Amendment Rights at an airport. Searches and seizures at an airport are not subject to any requirement of reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or warrant. It's called the Border Search Exception ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), it has been in effect since the 1970s (or earlier?), and pretty much every related case was ruled in favor of the government.

So you're saying you've never heard of slashvertisement under your rock? Must be a really nice rock.

Some manufacturers incorporate water cooling pipes into their solar panels. Keeps the PV cells cool and efficient. Produces hot water which is usually a welcome side-effect. Tesla's shingles don't have water cooling yet, but I'm sure it will come.